The Meiji Guillotine Murders

Futaro Yamada's The Meiji Guillotine Murders deserves to be ranked among the classics, such is its depth and ingenious construction - a riveting overarching historical mystery made up of a series of short intellectual detective stories recalling the serialised releases of Conan Doyle or Poe, with each chapter another diabolical puzzle involving murder set against the upheavals of the Meiji Restoration - a shaken language system, for example, or upended religions, wild new fashions and social classes, unusual imported methods of crime and punishment, and upheaved politics, just to start!

★★★★★

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The Shape Of Snakes

It's really not until the very last page of Minette Walter's book that satisfaction is delivered, and it isn't the satisfaction mystery buffs generally look foward to as they churn through such crime books - it is a grim comeuppance rather than a thrilling twist, and a rather sad endnote that finally explains why the book's lead character, a schoolteacher, has been doggedly investigating a 1978 death, trying to prove neighbour "Mad Annie" was murdered twenty years earlier in her suburban London street, an investigation overrun with unpleasant characters - racists, rapists, abusers and ransackers - all indistinguishable from each other that, as you slog through the 400 pages, you'll eventually give up trying to distinguish which family is which and which repellent side character belongs to which subplot, and resign yourself to the idea that they may as well have all done it.

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The Mystery of Three Quarters

Daft from its outset when a woman, Sylvia Rule, not only accosts Hercule Poirot believing him to have sent her a poison pen letter but also longwindedly explains to him what he'd know had he really sent it, this Sophie Hannah mystery is a ponderous exercise with a nebulous plot centred on a non-event (the accidental death in a bath of a feeble old patriarch) and when you've finally reached the last boring word having endured all manner of unlikely character psychology (including a Hercule Poirot who winks slyly and grins as he lies and tells a businessman his secretary was in an accident and will lose both her legs), you realise the biggest mystery here is why the overseers of the Agatha Christie estate would allow such thinly-plotted tripe to be published in the Queen of Mystery's name.

★☆☆☆☆

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